Posts Tagged ‘Rectangle’

Having just finished my work with a bunch of Year 3 – who are far fussier than I remember – I feel quite pleased.

They were able to build and complete the secret construction quicker and more accurately than I first hoped, they used a good range of language – next to, on top of, it looks like a house (!) – and generally they worked well together.

I used magnetic polydron to build the shape for the secret construction again. In fact, I decided I would use the same shape entirely for the job, with the same colours too! It was clear that they had done this activity before. They knew what was expected of them – although that didn’t stop me from telling them – and how to go about getting to a satisfactory end. Certainly the secret construction is an activity that works lower down school than I am used to and I can see it being of value to them from a vocabulary, communication and shape point of view. The only problem with magnetic polydron is that currently we only have squares and equilateral triangles, which limits the number of shapes we can make. I have included some of their creativity with the equipment from the very end of the session when I let them have a little play…

During the string activity, it was clear that they had limited knowledge of shape names. They struggled to predict what shapes would be made – although a couple did correctly identify a hexagon. When a star shape was created with a heptagon inside, I already knew they wouldn’t have a clue what it was, so focussed on the outside shapes instead.

Now, because of troubles when lowering the string to the floor, we ended up with some unusual patterns around the edge. We had trapeziums and triangles… the trapezium intruiged me. So I asked them what they thought it was called. Instantly, we had the name ‘square‘, which lead me to ask why they considered it a square. The response I got showed their knowledge, but also immediately reminded them they were wrong. They said, “It has four sides… but they’re not the same size, so it can’t be a square.” Intelligent thinking! This lead another child to say, “Well it must be a rectangle then!” Prompting another to say, “But it doesn’t have four right angles.”

While I wasn’t expecting this at all, it showed that a simple thing can generate such a wonderful discussion. To me it doesn’t matter that they didn’t know what a trapezium was, it was valuable enough for me to go back to their teacher and tell him that those children knew the properties, roughly anyway, of a rectangle and a square. And thinking about it, that’s all they should know. After all, it’s the fourth week of their first half term in Key Stage 2 – their knowledge of shape hasn’t been touched since the back end of Year 2 anyway, and that would consist of looking at the names of basic shapes.

If it taught me one thing, it’s that I haven’t been around Year 3 enough lately, that I’ve become used to the language and abilities of Years 5 and 6 so much that I’ve desensitised myself from children further down the school.

I certainly need to make time to work with them more throughout this course.